Radiohalos

Startling evidence of catastrophic geologic processes on a young earth

Most people would be familiar with granites (figure 1) because they are a popular
rock used for bench tops in many home kitchens. Their colourful interlocking crystals
give them an aura of intrigue and elegance. As well as glassy, pink and cream crystals,
granites are often sprinkled with flakes of a black, shiny mineral called biotite.

To the unaided eye, the flat surfaces of biotite flakes look polished and smooth,
but under the microscope they often can be seen to contain tiny crystals of other
minerals, particularly zircon. Even more fascinating, such zircon crystals are typically
surrounded by halos of dark, coloured rings. Resembling minuscule archery targets,
these halos represent a fascinating story about the age of the earth.

Uranium radiohalos

It is known that the halos are formed by radioactive uranium inside the zircons.1,2
The radioactivity damages the biotite and changes its colour (figure 2). That’s
why the spherical halos are called ‘radiohalos’ (short for radioactive
halos), and their centres are called ‘radiocentres’.

Furthermore, there is a simple reason why uranium halos have many rings. It’s
that uranium decays in a series of steps, eight of which produce rings (figures
3 and 4).

At today’s measured rates of radioactive decay, it has been estimated that
uranium would have to decay for 100 million years to produce the uranium halos.3 That is at today’s decay rates.
Alongside the uranium halos within granites, there is powerful evidence that uranium
once decayed much faster during a global geological catastrophe! Let’s see
that evidence.

Polonium radiohalos

The last three rings of a uranium halo are produced by an element called polonium.
Marie Curie (with her husband, Pierre) discovered it in 1898 and named it after
her homeland, Poland.

One of the important features of radioactive polonium is that it decays rapidly
and thus is rarely found in nature. However, it is continually gener­ated when uranium
decays, and so radio­active polonium is always associated with uranium.

Diagram by Andrew A. Snelling

Figure 2: The radioactivity of the uranium inside the zircon crystal shoots
out in all directions into the surrounding biotite flake, damaging it and producing
a spherically coloured shell or halo
Click
here for larger view

Photo by Mark Armitage

Figure
3: (a) A fully developed uranium radiohalo with all eight rings present.
Its diameter is approximately 68 microns (a micron is a thousandth of a millimeter).

It came as a great surprise, therefore, when researchers discovered radiohalos that
were produced by polonium alone (figures 5–7). How did polonium come to exist
on its own in the radiocentres of these halos? This question has puzzled scientists
for many years, and has even been debated in the courtrooms of the USA.4

But how do we know that they really are polonium halos? Answer: the polonium halos
are readily identified by the numbers of rings, and the sizes of those rings (figures
4–7). This has been confirmed by experiments.5,6

Furthermore, what does the existence of these polonium halos mean? Because polonium
has such a fleeting existence, the polonium halos must have formed very rapidly,
in only hours or days!7 So there
had to be a source of abundant polonium close by to create the radiocentres. Otherwise
the polonium halos would not have formed.

Photo by Andrew A. Snelling

Figure 6: A fully developed polonium-214 radiohalo with two rings,
the outer ring not being so visible.
Click
here for larger view

Photo by Mark Armitage

Figure 7: A group of very clear single-ring polonium-210 radiohalos.
Their diameters are approximately 39 microns.

Figure 11 : Diagrammatic cross-section through a biotite
flake showing a uranium radiohalo (left) and a nearby polonium-210 (single ring)
radiohalo (right). Hot waters flowing between the flake’s sheets carry polonium
from the decaying uranium in the zircon radiocentre of the uranium radiohalo across
to form the polonium-210 radiocentre and radiohalo. Click
here for larger view

Many of the polonium halos have uranium halos right next to them, often less than
one millimetre away (figures 8–10). As the uranium in the centres of the uranium
halos decayed and produced the halo rings, it also generated polonium. Hot water
flowing inside the cooling granite was able to carry the polonium short distances
and concentrate it into new radiocentres. These formed the polonium halos (figure
11).

Astounding implications

The implications are astounding. First, the polonium halos required an abundant
supply of polonium, in fact, an amount equivalent to 100 million years of radioactive
decay of uranium, at today’s rates. However, all this polonium had to be available
quickly, before it could decay away. That is, it all had to concentrate within hours,
or a few days at the most. Therefore, the polonium halos mean that 100 million years
of radioactive decay of uranium (at today’s rates) occurred in just a few
days! In other words, the radioactive decay of uranium was formerly up to a billion
times faster than it is today!

the polonium halos are solid evidence that rocks ‘dated’ at billions of years old by the radioactive methods are in fact only a few thousand years old!

Second, if uranium decayed at such a super-fast rate, the other radioactive elements
decayed much faster too. However, the radioactive methods used to ‘date’
rocks as billions of years old assume that radioactive decay rates have always been
the same as what we measure today. Thus, the polonium halos are solid evidence that
rocks ‘dated’ at billions of years old by the radioactive methods are
in fact only a few thousand years old!

Third, the radiohalos can only form after the granites hosting them have solidified
and cooled.8 So the radioactive
decay of uranium, which generated the polonium, had to commence as soon as the granites
started to solidify, and continue until the polonium halos had formed. It is usually
claimed that granites take millions of years to solid­ify and cool. However, if
that were true, there would be no polonium halos in the granites today. In such
a long time, all the uranium and polonium would have decayed away. Therefore, polonium
halos mean that the granites solidified and cooled in just 6 to 10 days!

Startling evidence

Uranium and polonium radio­halos thus provide startling evidence of catas­trophic
geological processes on a young earth. During the year-long Flood (about 4,500 years
ago) sediments were eroded and deposited catastrophically on a global scale. The
catastrophe buried vast graveyards of plants and animals, producing fossil-bearing
rock layers all over the earth. Rapid earth movements pushed up mountains,9 and formed granite bodies quickly.
Inside these granites, super-fast radioactive decay generated uranium and polonium
radiohalos. These are so microscopic they could be easily overlooked.4
But their presence in abundance in granites all around the world cannot be ignored.10 They are exciting confirmation
that the earth and its rocks are not millions and billions of years old as usually
claimed, but only about 6,000 years, as God’s Word plainly declares in the
historical narratives in Genesis.

Dr G. Brent Dalrymple, then Deputy Director of the U.S. Geological
Survey and more recently at the Berkeley Geochronology Center at the University
of California Berkeley, dismissed the polonium radiohalos as ‘a very tiny
mystery’ while on the witness stand at the 1981 Arkansas ‘Creation Trial’,
as reported by: Gentry, R.V., Creation’s Tiny Mystery, Earth Science
Associates, Tennessee, p. 122, 1988. Return to text.

Ref. 7. Some granites have uranium and polonium radiohalos
in every biotite flake in them—for example, the Land’s End Granite of
Cornwall, England, and the Strathbogie Granite of Victoria, Australia.
Return to text.

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